These Photos Will Make You Nostalgic For Your Awkward Teenage Years
Fumi Nagasaka has been photographing youth culture in its myriad forms for more than a decade. Now based in New York City, she was born and raised in Japan. “I grew up in a few different places when I was a kid because of my dad’s job. He used to be a professional race car driver so we moved between Nagoya, where both my parents are from, and Tokyo.
I was a quiet kid, very into sports, and I got bullied for a time too. That phase was really formative for me.” Nagasaka’s teenage experiences, and the isolation she felt, fed into her enduring pull towards the specific passage of time between childhood and adulthood. Life carries you forward at an uneasy pace when you’re a teenager, doesn’t it? Nagasaka has always found the ways that different people navigate it fascinating.
Nagasaka’s first photobook, Dreaming Till The Sun Goes Down, was self-published in 2008. It followed the lives of three boys from three different cities (west London, Ålesund and Berlin), documenting each of them in their home environments. She went on to publish Untitled Youth in 2016, a collection of simple portraits she had made over a seven-year period. Now, Nagasaka has turned her attention to a new project, and a brand new book, entitled Teenage Riot. This time, she’s honed in on four girls from different parts of the globe.
“For Untitled Youth I wanted to focus on the simple and honest beauty of youth. I wanted to photograph something we adults are missing because we’ve grown up and just don’t have it anymore; purity, probably. My vision was to try to follow a thread back to that. Teenage Riot became a natural next step because of those previous projects.” Slipping into her subjects’ lives, she’d ask them to take her to their spaces and show her their way of doing things. With touching sensitivity, Nagaska built connections with each of the girls, becoming close to them in the process. “The girls have a lot to say but at that age you don’t always know the ways to express things yet. We talked a lot as we took photographs. There’s an honesty in the pictures that comes from them trusting I never judged them in any way.”
Through Nagasaka’s four subjects – Maxine, Fubuki, Alana and Isabella – we see a moving portrait of what she calls the “quiet riots” of girlhood: the highs and lows, the rapid changes in taste and style, the way identities and relationships are forged and evolve, and the chaotic and poignant inner lives they unravel and narrate to Nagasaka as they move through their teenage years.
Here, Nagasaka introduces us to the girls, and shares some of her favourite experiences with them.
“When I think about when I was younger, I remember how my teen life shifted. I was a basketball player until I was 16, I ate whatever I wanted to eat, and slept as long and as often as I could (even during classes). All I cared about was basketball at that time. After I quit playing – and basically living – basketball, I started to hang out with the ‘normal’ kids in my class: discovering makeup, fashion, pop idols and boys. I started to care about how I looked, obsess over how to lose weight, and often had fights with my mother. The quiet riot of teenagedom had well and truly begun. Now I’m in my 30s, and my stresses are finances, wrinkles, grey hair and having trouble sleeping. Those changes are endlessly interesting to me. We don’t really pay attention while it’s happening so I wanted to slow down that process and distil it in my photographs. There’s a lot to see through young eyes.”Photographs by Fumi Nagasaka.“Alana and Isabella are sisters and friends of another girl called Annabelle, who has been my muse for a long time, often appearing in both my commercial and personal work. The sisters were born and raised in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Isabella was 16 and Alana was 14 when I first photographed them. Both of them are very smart and study a lot at school, but outside of that they’re secretly wild, unbeknown to their mother. They got into smoking at an early age and that’s what they often do when she isn’t around.”Photographs by Fumi Nagasaka.“Another piece of the puzzle was Fubuki. I met her in Japan. She had just started modelling and we were introduced to each other by her agent who I’ve known for years.
Before I met Fubuki for the first time, I asked her agent about her, her personality, interests, hobbies, what she did in her spare time. I heard that she was very shy with no particular hobbies and no real defined personality yet, and that information made me all the more interested in her. She was 15 when I photographed her for the first time.”Photographs by Fumi Nagasaka.
“And lastly, Maxine is the daughter of the publishers of Teenage Riot. I met her at the New York Art Book Fair a couple of years ago, when she was there helping her parents. She was wearing big fake eyelashes. I visited the family in Canada and spent some time with Maxine. It was then I began to photograph her. She was obsessed with the selfie, admired Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton as her fashion icons. She’d be watching Victoria’s Secret fashion shows while her dad was showing me amazing art book collections. I went back the next year and photographed her again. By then she’d transformed again. It was fascinating.
One of my favourite pictures of her is this one. I shot it when she was 16. She loved wearing this Juicy Couture pink tracksuit and carrying a Gucci bag. She also had a Fendi. I loved her style. The town she grew up in and was living in back then was very small with no stores around, so she only had information of the world via her iPhone and built her style from there. I thought it was funny that she dressed up in her favourite outfit and walked her dog around her house.”Photographs by Fumi Nagasaka.
“After a year, I revisited Maxine and noticed she had matured. She had a calmer personality at that point, and she had changed her style. Now it was a BMW, adidas, watches, white sneakers, Michael Kors, and Big Gulps from Seven Eleven. She was telling me how silly hockey players were at school and she didn’t want to be one of the girls who go after them. She actually got her first boyfriend when I was there and we went to a shopping mall in another city to buy a dress for her formal at bebe – her new favourite shop.”Photographs by Fumi Nagasaka.“There are two photographs of Isabella and Alana I particularly love. This one is in front of a local deli around the corner. The pair often wear their mum’s clothes and go to the deli to get Takis, a spicy Mexican snack, and Jarritos, Mexican soda.”“The other picture I love is this one. Isabella and Alana were smoking and eating Takis on Annabelle’s rooftop last summer. They always stick together and there is definitely a big sister, little sister dynamic between them. Isabella styles Alana.”Photographs by Fumi Nagasaka.“Fubuki and I were walking around the Hibiya area in Tokyo when I took this picture. I like Hibiya because old and new traditions are all mixed up together. There’s not many young fashion kids there, it’s more Japanese ‘salary men’ and older people. One area has an old park that still has old cafés and kiosks and a big fountain where salary men sit down and have lunch during the day, one area has many reasonable bistros for them to gather after work, and another area recently got a huge department store and urban facilities for shopping and fancy food. However, behind all those places, there is the Imperial Palace. I thought this area was a great backdrop to portray the new generation and Fubuki.”Photographs by Fumi Nagasaka.“Fubuki’s agent said that she hadn’t discovered her style yet. With that in mind, I asked her to tell Fubuki to bring her school uniform because it felt like the most neutral way to represent her. When it came to us meeting, I was quite surprised about her skirt because when I was a high school student, my school was very strict that our skirts had to be below the knee, and only the boldest girls shortened their skirts. We walked around Tokyo in the middle of an incredibly hot summer, and I asked her some questions. She was hesitant to answer in the beginning but as time went by she started to open up to me more, and I began to learn about her. She loves to dance to hip-hop.
Of all the girls, I see myself in Fubuki most. She’s shy and quiet but with a strong and stubborn will that she doesn’t quite know how to harness yet. It’s like she has something inside that she hasn’t been able to discover. I am the total opposite of Maxine, Alana and Isabella, and a young me would have been a little bit envious of them because of that.”Photographs by Fumi Nagasaka.
Like what you see? How about some more R29 goodness, right here?
